Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/249

XVIII ] ideas are the same as those of Neoplatonist-influenced writers whom he might have read, but it is certain that he accepted them as "revelations" because they too came to him when he was more or less entranced, as we now should say. (He was to call it "a suspension of bodily sensations" during which man could receive "angelic wisdom" "by influx from above into the spiritual parts of his mind." 8)

Certainly it could be said that while in this state his unconscious mind produced ideas for him that seemed visible or audible, but which might have their origin in his past reading. For those who favor the "spirit" theory it could of course be maintained that as he recovered from the surprised shock of having his hand move of his own accord, he stopped accepting the more primitive "spirits" which were doing the writing and, reverting to his own enlightened beliefs, became connected, through the power of the association of ideas, with "spirits" sympathetic to those beliefs, who then took control either of his hand or of his attention.

It is clear from the handwriting of the first draft of the Arcana that he was not in a normal state when writing most of the work. Although it varies from the violent script to the almost normal, it is certainly written under stress.

But it is not the Bible exegesis of these volumes which is likely to be of interest now, nor even the frequent sublimity of the spiritual perceptions. They could be matched from the writings of other mystics. What cannot be matched are his reports from "the other world," "from things heard and seen"—they could not have been predicted from what we know of his reading or his experience. Quite the contrary. In the work on The Soul he asserted that once free of the body the soul would live a life pure beyond imagination. But after he had had, as he claimed, experience of the world of spirits, he said they had hardly changed a bit from this world, that, in fact, the Christians were the worst of all.9 He said, in effect, it is very different from the way you think it is, and merely dying is no admission to either heaven or hell.

Had he come to his new experiences with settled opinions and fixed ideas as to what the other world was to be like, one would expect that a consistent account would soon emerge, but it did not. Time and again he eagerly tried to construct the whole from some